The 7 Year Itch: A Look Back at Secretary

“The sweetest romantic comedy about S&M since, well...ever,” says Blackbook of the then-quirky, now-seminal film Secretary. Was it a massive step toward the mainstreaming of kinky culture or a lopsided portrayal that did more harm than good? Seven years later, people’s opinions remain sharply divided.

Miss Holloway? Mr. Grey Will See You Now.

I was 24, just discovering James Spader and still trapped in my conservative, pre-high-speed-internet hometown. The lone independent video store that had boasted a large back room was bought out by the very Blockbuster I found Secretary in, and the movie hadn’t come to the only theater in town (the one that would, years later, post giant warnings when it dared to show Brokeback Mountain).

I was enraptured by Secretary. I had never seen a portrayal of female masturbation that I could relate to. As a single kinkster who’d only had a brief taste of giggly partner play in the past, the image of Lee Holloway desperately trying to spank herself and finding it wanting struck home all too well. My identity as a switch solidified as I found myself identifying with desperately smart-assed submissive Lee at some points and conflicted, dominant-despite-himself Mr. Grey in others. And sure, it didn’t hurt that I had a little bit of an office fetish myself. I already had an inkling that BDSM could be used in a healing fashion, and often pondered the fascinating line between unhealthy self-harm and healthy BDSM play that Secretary explored at length. Hooray! I thought. At last! This weird little film explains it all for curious vanilla people!

My sparkly-eyed chipmunk-cheeked naiveté only lasted till I found my way into the BDSM community, where my glowing review was often met with incredulous stares. “[The filmmakers] missed their own boat,” says Jake, a lifestyle veteran heading up a Leather family. “They got the fact that [Lee] had a lot of internal hang-ups and problems, and was able to work through this with BDSM, but then they missed out on all the negotiation and the responsibility of a top to make sure they’re OK. It was so close, and then they just missed it entirely.”

But those aren’t the only moments of unreality Secretary viewers dislike. “I don’t feel the part of an actual boss hiring someone for the intent of being an SM toy is accurate at all,” says Shell, a 29-year-old with five years in the kink community. “It’s the whole sexual harassment thing.”

Jake concurs: “If you’re a boss and offer to spank your secretary for typos, you’re gonna get sued! You’re not actually going to find a beautiful slave. You will, in fact, find yourself somebody’s bitch in the downtown holding pen.”

Once the intensity of my viewing experience had settled somewhat—and my own in-person kink experience broadened—I could see the truth in the viewpoints of the film’s detractors. Watching the movie again, I could see all the plot holes and inconsistencies, the inappropriate presumptions and unrealistic depictions. But there were still too many joys to write the film off completely; I found more philosophic truths my next time around, even if they were created via a fairly broad artistic license.

Twitter denizen Guilty also found different notes of truth in the film: “I hadn’t known how close the kink scene was to those who self-harmed; a surprise to me.” But far from coming away with an inaccurate perception of these two things as joined at the hip, Guilty notes: “I know there’s a tiny bit of cross-over now. The film wasn’t meant to be representational of either community. It’s Cinderella.”

Shell espouses a similar comfort with the film’s role as art rather than documentary. “I do feel parts of it are accurate, like him not wanting to fall in love with her due to fear of changing the dynamic. I don’t feel it was lacking at all. I think it’s a nice glimpse into what BDSM may or may not be.” Shell finds it easy to differentiate between Secretary’s problems and its racy bits: “It still turns me on. The first time I watched it I had to smoke a cigarette after I was done!”

For all its foibles, the parts generally considered “right” in Secretary are considered very, very right. Jake notes: “They did such a wonderful depiction of the kind of poise and calm and peace that can come from really well-developed slavery and submission.” The film’s opening flash-forward to Lee dreamily working her way through office tasks while in intense bondage shows Lee “looking completely at ease and happy and productive, more so than she ever did at any other time in the movie. It was striking to me, beautiful and very much an encapsulation of everything that’s great and beneficial about this practice. The self-possession—which is not the common media representation of this!”

The mainstreaming of kink cuts both ways, particularly when it’s packaged up as a cute, sexy rom-com. Several years after Secretary’s release, my father called me and asked whether I had seen it. Presuming that this was a “call the kinky writer and see if I’ll be creeped out by this movie that just came on Showtime” kind of inquiry, I said that I had and asked what he wanted to know. Laughing, he admitted that he had rented the movie (probably at the same Blockbuster I had years ago) and watched it with his wife the night before. I later looked up the movie poster and understood: It features a woman bending over in fishnets, stilettos, and a short skirt from behind, with the word “secretary” in typewriter font across her ass and “assume the position” as the tagline. Presuming a standard tits-and-ass movie lay in wait inside is understandable, and perhaps intentional.

My dad laughed his way through his opinions, having found the film weird and outrageous. While one could make the argument that exposure was good for him, this type of dramatized, sometimes-unrealistic portrayal led to a few months of shock when he stumbled across an article I had written about my own BDSM experiences. Unable to read beyond the first paragraph, he presumed my experience based on things like Secretary and stopped speaking to me while he struggled with what he thought I was up to. Once he brought himself to read the article and see it as it really was in my case, he found it infinitely more palatable than the film’s often-overdone set pieces.

“In the end sum,” says Jake, “I don’t know, honestly, if it wound up doing more harm than good. If there was more realism out there, at all, I would say yeah, we can move forward and move into parable-land, but there’s not…. [Mainstream audiences] don’t know that it’s a parable, that it’s fantasy, that it’s a fairytale. They’re going to think that it’s reality.” The question of whether mainstream-but-dramatized depictions of BDSM harms more than it helps is still one very much up for grabs.

Indeed, it may be the dearth of reasonably realistic depictions of kink in film, even seven years later, that keeps Secretary in the mix. I still sometimes assign it as required viewing for certain kinkster newbies under my aegis, particularly those who come in with a heavy sense that dominants should never show weakness, always be right, and perpetually fart rainbows—but I make sure to sit beside them during the viewing and head off the inaccuracies as they arise. It is far easier to provide as-it-happens fact-checking for Secretary than it is for the wildly inaccurate portrayals of BDSM shown in Law & Order, Bones, and other legal/medical dramas eager for a sexy-problem-of-the-week premise.

At present, Secretary is really the only mainstream movie we have to point to, for all its weaknesses and flaws. Then again, all of us in the lifestyle suffer our own foibles; the desire for a perfect media representation is as implausible and fanciful as the desire for a perfect play partner. Maybe, in the end, Secretary’s lesson to all of us is that nonfiction is for learning the bones of a practice, and fiction is for learning the heart. (Or the boner.)

Comments

This movie was instrumental in my development and much like you I idealized it and then realized the reality of the situation. It's still a hot film that can get me going better than a lot of the "porn" out there now.

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I love robots, social media, words in all their many methods, music, reality TV, great food whether haute or pedestrian, and my lovers -- both physical and non-corporeal (my muse never lets me forget she's my primary partner). More KC madness at www.kalcobalt.com!